I finally watched Galaxy Quest for the first time today (Bad Trekkie! No biscuits for me haha) and all I want to know is what the (in-universe) fandom’s major slash pairing is, and how the wider fandom reacted.
I want to read the in-universe Fanlore.org articles about all the drama that happened when the first Taggert/Granthar (or whatever other pairing) slash shippers started openly publishing zines.
All of this makes a lot of sense! It’s eternally striking to me that ArchiveOfOurOwn will regularly feature stories that have like 20,000-word chapters (which personally drives me nuts because it’s so hard to keep track of where I am in a story) whereas Fanfiction.Net will often have these teensy chapters that are 500 words each or something. FFN will often feature 5+1 stories where each of the six micro-scenes is its own chapter, and AO3 pretty much never has formatting like that, with people almost always putting the entire list fic in one chapter.
Not gonna lie, I’m glad I missed the era when FFN had super-long chapters. I always always prefer reading stories with shorter ones (although maybe I’ve just been trained that way with everything from James Patterson novels to drabble collections online). I do so hope that FFN continues to update its formatting into the future, because right now their formatting conventions make me tear my hair out every time I try to upload a fic or chapter there.
lukeskywalkersdepressionsnuggie:
something that i think about a lot and that really stresses me out is archiving fandom like
over time fandoms go through so many distinct phases, and use such particular language and phrases, and have so many trends and reactive movements, and just this huge behind the scenes unique culture where so much is created. Not just fic and fan art, but the whole fan culture of a particular fandom moment. Like the popular ships, and crack theories, and specific jokes and memes that get passed around.
I know the fanlore wiki has a lot of this stuff for older and bigger fandoms, but i still get stressed because i don’t want anything to be forgotten. Like i don’t want all the wild harry potter crack theories to be lost, of les mis fandom memes, or the legendary a;tla ship wars (even the bad parts of fandom should be preserved for people to learn from, because this same shit inevitably repeats itself). And in addition to wanting to preserve current fandom cultures or ones from the recent past, i also love learning about the culture of much older, established fandoms like star wars and stark trek! Like the fact that skysolo was a thing back when the OT was coming out and that george lucas hated it so much that he did everything in his power to shut it down. That’s such an important part of the sw fandom culture! Or how fan perception of characters evolves and changes over time, like with the ewoks.
i think part of what makes it so hard is that even though fandom these days mostly takes place on the internet, it still has many of the same drawbacks and flaws that things considered “oral tradition” might. Like things are rarely published in an official sense; tropes, theories, and jokes are often collaboratively created; information is shared in the form of text posts and on message boards. It’s even harder with older fandom material that comes mostly from zines and early-internet message boards that are unfortunately often lost or deactivated.
hopefully there are starting to be more people out there who actually document these things. I actually had a class just this past semester where we briefly studied harry potter fandom trends and there were actual scholarly articles that cited fics on ao3. But yeah i spend way too much time on the fanlore wiki and way too much time thinking about this but fandoms are an important cultural element that should be documented and archived for future generations
…that thing during Warnings Wank (c. 2009, as I recall) in which the whole pro-warnings side insisted that this was not a slippery slope, and that demanding writers slap warnings on everything would not lead to censorship? And that it wasn’t about moral judgement and never would be?
Because I, sitting on this great dustbin lid as we continue to slide down this actually very slippery slope, certainly do. And I have laffed many a bitter laff because of it.
I have been vindicated by the march of time and I AM NOT PLEASED.
Churning along with the Ansereg reposting-fics-to-AO3 project…and I’ve got a story that’s never been online before. It’s from this zine I put together in 2004, cover art by Hope Hoover back in her LOTR fandom days.
The story is a fluffy, kinky Elladan/Elrohir one-shot, Fine Physic. Elladan is melancholy: Elrohir knows what he needs. And on a night with exceptional privacy, they take it further than they’ve dared before. Do read the warnings!
You can also download the entire zine gratis from this link.
Here is a downloadable LOTR fanzine.
guys, did you know that in 10 days – on 29 may 2017, it will be the 10th anniversary of strikethrough?
let me tell you a thing about your fandom history. back in the good ol days of livejournal, strikethrough/boldthrough were a series of purges done on livejournal blogs and communities done out of a moral panic raised by a right-wing internet watchdog group. in fact, one of the main reasons behind the founding of the organisation for @transformativeworks and the archive of our own is because of this – because fandom needed a space free from censorship.
fandom also left livejournal for this blue hellsite because of strikethrough and now, ten days before the 10 year anniversary of strikethrough, that entire shitlist wank has gone down in yoi fandom.
anyway
i just wanna say i would be totally down to do something on the 29th. to commemorate the 10th anniversary of strikethrough, i suggest we all post a fic to ao3 that day that specifically features at least one of the shitlist criteria.
who’d be interested in celebrating fandom history in this way with me?
We would love to hear about it! Send us a message, and we’ll find a way to get your knowledge on Fanlore!
- They use terms like lemons, smut, or UST to talk about the genre of their fic.
- They have squicks.
- They want you to have squicks. Which isn’t to say that they want to squick you, just that it’s a useful term.
- *glomps*
- They leave long comments on everything the read. Possibly not in the tags. They might do something super bizarre like send a message or put their thoughts on the end of your post.
- They write disclaimers on everything. Or on literally anything, since nobody does that anymore.
- They write about orbs, and those orbs are cerulean.
- Or literally anything else is cerulean. Cerulean is an outdated term. I’m calling it.
- The tongues of their characters are still battling for dominance, even though it’s 2017, and really a winner should have been declared by now.
- They have a fear of Mary Sue.
- Characters in their modern AU are chatting on AIM instant messenger, and calling each other on landlines. There are references to Ceiling Cat, because the characters are hip to meme culture. This AU is ~modern~ after all.
- Their fic is interlaced with slightly relevant song lyrics (disclaimer, they didn’t write the song.)
- They don’t do any of above, because they are New Fandom Savy, but they write or reblog nostalgic posts about these things.
- They had a livejournal.
- They still have a livejournal.
- They ended up on tumblr only after getting into a new fandom, searching livejournal for content and fellow fans, and suddenly coming to the startling realization that livejournal has become a barren wasteland of tumbleweeds and chirping crickets.
- They miss their geocities site.
- They wrote fic for the X-Files while the original nine seasons were still airing.
- Bonus, they wrote fic for the original Star Trek and published it in a zine, before the Internet was a thing. That’s like super mega fandom old.
- They might be less inclined to call themselves “trash”, but they are totally out there, reading all the things.
These are my favorites. I have duplicates of some, but not all:
The Bloodstone: An AU in which Kirk and Spock are stranded on a world of medieval danger and intrigue, swords, and strange psionic crystals.
Spock Enslaved: When the landing party that has beamed down to a planet named Atlantis discovers that the economy is based on owning and selling slaves, they object, and are captured and turned into slaves themselves. The Prefect finds Spock fascinating and pulls him from the state slave pool to become his own personal slave. At first Spock refuses, but learns that his resistance causes Kirk and McCoy to be brutally punished, so he gives in, doing the most menial tasks as well as the most objectionable whenever the Prefect snaps his fingers. On the outside, Spock may look and act like a well-trained slave, but on the inside, he is burning with plans to stage a slave rebellion – no matter what the cost!
Don’t Tell It to the Captain: A hilarious hurt comfort novel inwhich Spock is badly injured in a turbolift malfunction just before the Enterprise is due to have a full inspection by a cranky, by-the-book admiral. Regulations state that any individual who remains unfit for duty longer than 20 days must be rotated to a base hospital, but Kirk knows if Spock is transferred, the Vulcan will be reassigned when he recovers and someone will be assigned to take his place aboard ship. Wanting to avoid that at all costs, Kirk demands McCoy find a way to keep Spock on the ship and certify him fit for light duty before the inspection ends – not a small task! With the help of the entire crew at one time or another, McCoy and Scotty alternately cover up, mislay and hide a drugged-to-the-gills Vulcan. They make sure that at no time does Kirk ever become aware of their shennanigans so he can truthfully tell the admiral that his first officer is indeed on the ship, but just…elsewhere each time the admiral wants to talk to him. Hijinks abound, and the motto of the crafty crew? “Don’t tell it to the captain
I don’t have a copy at this time. Just my own personal copy.
More history about these zines (including reviews) at Fanlore:
[Fandom] takes the place of some of the functions of a church in a small town: A place where people come together, ostensibly to worship something. But really what’s happening is you’re forming a community. It’s less about what you’re worshiping and more about, “We have these interests in common.” Someone has a sick aunt and suddenly it’s about that, raising money to help her or sharing resources to make her life easier. That’s what it was about with The X-Files on the Internet.
David Duchovny, Los Angeles Times
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5128208/actors-who-get-fandom
I’ve never really seen any celebrity “get” fandom the way Duchovny did. A lot of people read that quote and, at the time, mistakenly read it as David saying he was like a god. But what he meant was that (as I believe he clarified elsewhere) fans didn’t need him to make an appearance. Fandom wasn’t about him. It was about us–the fans.
I want us to not forget that. When the fandom’s centre stops being the community of fans and becomes, instead, focused on–even blinded by–the glittering idol, then fandom itself becomes nothing more than idolatry–with all of us, as individuals, jockeying for a touch or a piece of that idol and stomping over each other to get it.
I’ve seen fandoms fall apart when that happens. I’ve seen fandoms become places where fans know and care more about the celebrities than we do about each other.
I know there are good reasons for fans to create personas and screen names. But this might be a good time to re-introduce ourselves to each other. And to think about how much more important that is than is meeting a famous person at the stage door.
(via miriamheddy)
Click here: http://www.revelist.com/tv/star-trek-fandom-50th/4643
i also think this new trend of neo-victorian purity culture in fandom that ridicules people for shipping “bad” ships and attacks writers whose fics have “problematic” content is subtly tied to fandom’s new visibility and conditional mainstream acceptance. because of twitter and the increasing celebrity and showrunner interaction with fans, and because representation politics have somehow melded with respectability politics, there’s this push to “cleanse” ourselves of weird, freaky, disturbing, embarrassing content and present ourselves to the world as just “normal” people who love tv shows and books. because if they see we’re normal and cool, they’ll listen to us right? they’ll respect our demands right? they’ll give us our ships right? nope! instead we’re experiencing a massive dearth in fandom creativity because people are only invested in supporting and uplifting canon ships and canon stories, and instead of looking to ourselves for creativity and representation we’re depending on showrunners who’ve never had our best interests at heart. and honestly eff that. i don’t care about being seen as “normal”. i’m a weirdo! i’m a freak! fandom is weird and freaky and i’m okay with that! in fact, there’s power in that. we don’t need some stamp of approval from showrunners and celebrities, and we certainly don’t need to justify why we write or desire certain content in our fics. be weird! be freaky! be embarrassing! own it! it’s the only thing that’s truly ours.
The creator of this zine, Collete Zak, graciously is allowing me to share this with y’all. This is the Enterprise ship inspection story I see people wishing for on tumblr.
This is the funniest TOS fanzine of all time. Please! Read and enjoy!! And reblog!
[If you intend to share the link elsewhere than tumblr, please make a copy of the PDF on another host. Thanks! Not sure how much traffic google drive is going to allow.]
This is one of the greatest Star Trek zines ever made, imho. We are lucky to have the pdf version, because copies of the original zine are very hard to find.
karajstorm I just sent you a Tumblr PM. I am trying to get into contact with Collete Mak to get her permission for another fanzine preservation project. Let me know if you received it.
Okay, some fandom history, why show writers and authors say “for legal reasons” the can’t read fan fic.
Back in ancient times in the 1970s there was a show called Star Trek the Animated Series. It was on the air as fandom culture around Star Trek was really taking route and there were many fanzines (things on actual paper that people bought) being published and the first conventions to attend.
David Gerrold was a writer for Star Trek the Animated Series who had also written one of the most famous episodes of the original series The Trouble with Tribbles. While he was around the production office for STtAS he was introduced to a couple of fans who proceeded to tell him all about their ideas for an episode–essentially a sequel to his famous episode–which it so happens he had already written a script for. When that episode aired he received a letter from one of those fans lawyers demanding “credit”. It so happened that he could prove that the episode existed before the meeting but the involvement of lawyers and a threat to sue became widely known.
Marion Zimmer Bradly was, before recent horrifying revelations decades after her death, a titan of fantasy writing. She also welcome fan fiction and published it in anthologies and in a magazine she published. One day she opened a story sent to her and the plot of the story was essentially the plot of a a novel she had nearly finished writing. More than a years worth of her work was now unpublishable because it was provable that she had read this story with this similar plot and she couldn’t prove the work on the novel existed before she saw the story. She stopped publishing anthologies and fan fiction and in particular the MZB story is the one a lot of professional writers know as representative of the dangers of fan fiction.
So when a writer says they can’t read fan fiction for legal reasons it’s that their own lawyers are protecting them from outside lawsuits.
And this is why knowing your fandom history matters.
Exactly.
And writers don’t want to be influenced by your fan-fic either. We don’t want to end up inadvertently stealing your ideas because we read them three years ago and forgot we did.
So, just don’t show fan fiction or sequential fan art to writers. Actors also often have contracts that prevent them from reading it so they aren’t influenced.
If some people are wondering why I rarely read extended/worldbuilding fanfic set in the Ash universe, even if you send them to me (i.e., I usually say sorry but I can’t read this), this is why :)
Even if it won’t come down to legalities I don’t want to accidentally use someone else’s idea and create conflict over it.
Boy howdy, does knowing your history matter. And the reason is that THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENED WITH MZB!
It’s certainly what plenty of authors thought happened or claimed happened for years and years, but it has been debunked. Authors who hate fic still regularly trot it out though.
We may never know exactly what really happened, but we have accounts both from the fan in question and from very pro-MZB people that agree: the fan never tried to sue.
MZB had a massive stroke and thereafter “wrote” a number of books with “cowriters”. This was some V.C. Andrews level “Totes wrote it! Plz give $$$” nonsense. From much later accounts, MZB was in no state to write, and some of those books were later quietly changed to give complete credit to the “cowriter”.
MZB had possibly planned to eventually expand on some bit of her canon. She liked a particular fanfic that expanded on the same bit of canon. She tried to buy the rights to this fan’s writing, but the fan didn’t like the deal she was offered, fearing that it was a payoff in exchange for using her work wholesale and giving her zero credit. (Seems like a reasonable fear to me, given what was going on with MZB’s writing at that point!) They had a falling out over money and contract negotiations, just like eleventy-billion other creative professionals have.
However, to keep the MZB brand and money machine going, it was important to shit all over everyone in the vicinity. All that “A yeeeeear of my woooorrrrk!” bullshit was to explain why MZB wasn’t writing much, since the real reason–that she couldn’t write–was something they were keen to keep under wraps. In fact, according to the fan involved, the only time anyone actually threatened to sue was when MZB’s lawyers threatened her should she reveal MZB’s situation.
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Marion_Zimmer_Bradley_Fanfiction_Controversy
MZB’s cronies fucked us fanfic writers for decades over a total urban legend.
(And, yes, I’m sure this got debunked five trillion times already, but it’s Tumblr, so I can’t expand all the notes and see.)
How’s this for irony. The same Marion Zimmer Bradley who has been used for decades to paint fanfic writers as dangerous threats to authors and their livelihood….
…is the same writer who wrote cross-over fanfic with her one of her Darkover characters and one of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings characters and published it.
From Fanlore, the fan-run wiki about media fandom:
“Andúril is a gen Tolkien one-shot zine. It is thought to be the first Tolkien fanzine published. From an entry at Marquette Library the “publication of Anduril ceased when rumors surfaced that Tolkien did not like it."
It was originally published as self-published chapbook in 1961, as "Andúril” in 1962, and then again in Starstone #1 in 1978.
Andúril 1 (“Flame of the West”) was published in summer of 1962 and it featured "A Meeting in Hyades“ by MZB. In it, Regis Hastur, or a character that later developed into Regis, meets a character from LOTR somewhere in the Darkovan mountains. “
The use name of the Tolkien character was Speranzu otherwise known as Aragorn.
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEDe210KiWE)
First off, this is the best convention trailer ever.
Second, if you are a Kirk/Spock fan (or suspect you might be one) sign up for Kiscon as the celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Amok Time”. The event will be held in Los Angeles, CA on Sept 15-17. If you cannot attend, sign up for a supporting membership.
https://www.kiscon.org/
So, I stumbled across a bunch of fanzines from the 80s-90s-00s at a Goodwill and I have been in hysterics reading some of the stories. I thought some of the stuff on AO3 was out there. They’ve got nothing on a Greatest American Hero/Incredible Hulk team-up or Magnum P.I./Dynasty/Hulk or even Knight Rider/Hardcastle & McCormick.
Also, we should be thankful we have places to share our work online.